Choke Point (5 page)

H
aving received a text from Grace that her delay tactics went according to plan, that Sonia Pangarkar departed on the number 13 without her tail, Knox slows as he approaches the Dylan Hotel’s front doors.

Three people occupy the far sidewalk—an older couple with a dog on a leash, and a woman crouched and petting the dog. Four other people on his sidewalk, a good distance away and moving.

He carries the camera bag. The Dylan Amsterdam is four interconnected Keizersgracht canal houses. A courtyard at the entrance. It’s a European mix of contemporary and classical. Once into the hotel, the guest is enfolded in cream walls with white enamel trim; large windows flood the rooms with light. An eclectic collection of contemporary furniture coddles the weary. Knox enters the hotel lounge, a floor of reclaimed barn wood. He looks around.

She isn’t here.

According to Grace, Sonia had followed his instructions to the letter. So why not to their conclusion? Has he helped her lose her tail only to get nothing in return?

Only now does he realize Sonia Pangarkar was the woman petting the dog. She’d checked him out—might’ve even snapped a photograph. The cautious and curious journalist.

He’s an ass for making such a sophomoric mistake. He orders a beer and sits on the love seat with his back to a stone wall.

He sends a text:

cute dog. if you trust no one, you have no one. you have 15 minutes.

The cold beer goes down smoothly. There’s a long hallway with windows that look out onto gardens and the canal beyond, and she comes down it like a runway model—all alone, arms swaying by her side, a boldness to her walk. Not a woman easily intimidated. She trusts the safety of the surroundings. If he’d chosen a city park, she never would’ve showed.

His moment has arrived. He doesn’t consider himself much of an actor, but presenting himself to women is easy enough. Second nature. As smooth as the beer. He’s never been afraid of women. Appreciates the companionship. He’d rather see a movie with someone than alone, would rather share the Sunday paper, a meal, a drink.

The coffee she describes to the waitress has so many adjectives and descriptive clauses that the two might as well be speaking a foreign language. The waitress apparently has no trouble with interpretation and is off.

She stares at him. Not exactly sizing him up, but not letting him off the hook. If he were an artist he might consider painting her. He’d like to see her naked; it’s one of the first thoughts that pops into his head, and it surprises him. It’s her skin that is the elixir. He wants to see what that coloring does to all the various parts. His imagination is a little wild with it, and he blames it on the beer. He doesn’t consider himself the type to first undress a woman, and yet that’s exactly what he’s done. He can imagine she smells different—exotic, sweetly perfumed, but heavy with the musky scent from between her legs. It’s not a reaction he’s comfortable with. He’s aware it can give her an unfair advantage, a leverage that he has no intention of giving. He has only seen her at a distance. Sitting so close is disarming.

She possesses a professional edge that allows several minutes to hang in the air between them, the pendulum swinging back and forth between their nearly unflinching eyes. Each is waiting for the other to say something. Both understand that in a hand of bridge the lead carries a great burden: it establishes hierarchy, it sets the suit to be played. Better to let the other lead, and then elect to match suit or trump.

“John Steele,” he says. He has always gotten a kick out of the surname. Strong. Heavy. He pulls a business card out of his pocket knowing she isn’t the type to care about a business card, but he went to the bother—for her sake—and he has planned this out, and the business card is part of the plan. So he slides it across the table to her, and she flicks it by the corner in order to pick it up. Reads it. Flips it over. Looks back across to him. Maybe it has had more of an effect on her than he thought it might. Europe and Asia put much more stock in business cards than America. She’s a reporter. Maybe it’s enough evidence.

“So?” she says.

“The article on the sweatshop. Good writing. Bad photo.”

“It was carried on the wire, that photo. Published all around the world.” Her English is very good, though her accent thick.

“McDonald’s operates all around the world. I still don’t eat there.” He’d hoped for a smile, but she isn’t volunteering.

“Canada? The U.S.?”

“Once upon a time. And that time was a long time ago. Have you not seen my work?”

She studies the business card for a second time. “What is it you want?”

“I’ve been trying to get up my nerve to make you a business proposition. But you don’t make it easy. And I’m not exactly sure what’s going on with you. There are two of them. They take turns in the café.” He waits for that to sink in. “Watching you.”

“You were able to text me.”

“I sat above you in the café. Your Nokia shows its number when it boots up. You might want to change that.”

She wants to scoff at this; appears about to do so. He assumes it’s the look he gives her that convinces her otherwise. Knox never shies from allowing his confidence to show.

“Are you so resourceful? I don’t like this.”

“If you’re going after the story of the people running the sweatshop,” Knox says, “and I believe you are, it needs photographs. A hidden camera? Video? You know it. I know it.”

“The paper has photographers.” Dismissive. She scoots back her chair. “Besides, I filed that story. I’m on to other things.”

“No, you’re not.” He waits just long enough for her anger to stir. “You’re on leave. You’re working freelance.”

“And who are you working for, Mr. Steele?”

“One of your sources is dead. Another, assaulted.”

“And you’re my guardian angel.”

He doesn’t answer. For a moment he is at a loss for words. She’s not what he’d expected.

“What kind of photographer spots people watching other people? Or maybe you made it all up to impress me. Maybe you hired that man. It’s a lot of trouble to go to for some photo credits.”

“It’s a tough economy.”

Her laughter carries across the lounge. She covers her mouth, reminding him of Grace. Her eyes shine. A closer look tells him she’s exhausted.

“I don’t trust you, Mr. Steele.”

“Google my work. A picture’s worth a thousand words. You have my number.” Dulwich and Rutherford Risk have established both as part of his cover. He’s credited from Melbourne to Monterey.

“If you follow me again, if I see you again, I will call the police.”

“These people weren’t afraid to kill an EU bureaucrat. What chance do you think a reporter has?”

She stands, a pillar of righteousness. “A photographer has a better chance?”

“Do you trust them?” he says.

“They’re killers,” she returns.

“The police, I mean,” he says, surprising her. “Do you trust them?” She sits back down, weary now, fearful even.

Her silence reaches across the small table like the smell of fear.

“Can a sweatshop be run without police on the take?” he asks. “I’m asking. I don’t know Amsterdam well.”

Her eyes burn with hatred and resignation. He knows which one is meant for him.

“You intend to find the sweatshop.”

“Knot shop,” she corrects. “The young girls are recruited because their fingers are so small. Faster knots. Women, too. But the girls are far cheaper—a few euros a day if they’re lucky.”

“And then? Do you stop if you get the story?”

“Would you stop there?”

“I would not,” he says.

“Neither shall I.”

“And they will kill you. What is the point of that?”

“Were you sent to warn me?”

He laughs. “The man in the café should have been enough for that.”

“Indeed.” She nods thoughtfully.

“You’re out of your element.”

“And you are not?”

He doesn’t want to oversell. Doesn’t want the shrug mistaken as a promise. Doesn’t want to scare her off. There’s a connection between them, but it’s fragile at best.

“Two is better than one. We proved that at the café.”

“How do I know you didn’t set that up for my benefit?”

“You don’t. Though to be honest, I’m not that smart.”

She can’t fight the curl at the edge of her lips. “I doubt that,” she says. “All for a photo credit or two? I doubt that as well.”

“And you? Strictly humanitarian? No whiff of prizes, of peer recognition?”

“So crass.”

“I know who you are,” he says. “Professionally speaking, of course. I know what this story would mean for me. I don’t deny it. Do you?”

“I do. Absolutely.”

“All right then, I’ll accept you at your word.”

“We are at cross-purposes,” she says.

“Not at all. You need a wing man. Clearly.”

She considers this. She doesn’t like him, but there’s the promise of tolerance as she purses her lips and looks down at her hands.

He senses she’s not the type to shave her legs or underarms regularly. European. Her perfectly plucked eyebrows contradict the stringiness of her hair. He wonders if her present circumstances are responsible or if this reflects her personal grooming.

“Don’t follow me. Don’t text me.”

“You will come to find out that you don’t have to tell me things twice.” She stands and heads to the door without looking back.

He considers letting her go. Can’t stop himself. She’s gotten under his skin. He reaches her just before she opens the door to the street. Takes her by the arm, brings lips to her ear.

“Let me tell you something,” he whispers. “You had better adopt a new attitude. Check your surroundings. Switch sides of the street. Reverse directions. Learn to follow no patterns—none. Assume—do you hear me?—you assume you are being watched or followed at all times and you do everything in your power to lose them, to make them work at it, to expose themselves to you. Remember faces. If not me, you let someone close to you know when you suspect something. Stay at hotels and switch often. Pay cash. Do not use your apartment. Avoid your regular crowd. Maybe you stay alive. You march out of the hotel without precautions, as you are about to do now, you won’t last a week.” He releases her. She has been pulling against his grip and he’s held her too tightly. Her perfume or deodorant—something—envelops her in a warm, earthy glow.

Her arm is free. They meet eyes.

“Thank you.” She leaves his head spinning as she now takes in the lobby’s clientele and slips out the hotel doors and onto the busy sidewalk. She pauses, studying the passing pedestrians and the vehicles along
Keizersgracht.

A quick learner.

F
ollowing the address contained in the police report, Grace arrives at a nondescript brick apartment building, one of a line of identical structures on Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam’s Oud-West. The suburban neighborhood has all the elegance of a community college campus.

Grace double-checks the house number against the photocopied report.

The door is unlocked. She passes an umbrella stand and a boot brush. Finds a two-person elevator and a door marked as fire stairs. The staircase holds the unpleasant aftereffects of curry and cigarettes. The space is well lighted, with no graffiti. Posters warn of AIDS.

The man she confronted in the shisha café knew nothing of a newspaper reporter; had no bruises or signs of having been attacked. The man who’d checked into the hospital had provided a bogus address, but one that was registered to a man with his same name. Clever, yes. But also premeditated. He’d known how he would fill out the forms well before arriving at the emergency room. The beating had scared him. Finding such a cautious man will not be easy.

She walks the second-floor hallway, past doors muting the sounds of music and television, conversation and radio. She stops, recalling the police report. She grins, amused. The address is apartment 9. There are only eight apartments.

She retreats and knocks on the door. A Slavic woman answers, too pretty for such a place. She’s wearing a clean yet well-worn frock.

Grace displays her EU credentials. She speaks Dutch slowly. The woman has no trouble understanding. There is no man named Fahiz, Grace is told. Not that she knows of. People come and go. It is hard to keep track. We don’t know each other well, the woman confesses.

A second dead end from the elusive Kahil Fahiz, a man mistaken for another.

Grace is about to inquire if the police have been around, but thinks better of it. She thanks the woman and compliments her on her child, asleep in a springed rocker. Grace’s attention lingers a little too long on the infant.

“You have children of your own?” the woman asks.

Grace offers a half-smile, reminded of the wedding ring she wears as part of her cover. Thanks the woman. Descends the stairs in something of a trance. She feels weary. Old. She has left her high school sweetheart behind in China for a second time. Twice she has felt the skin peeled from her body; twice she has been forced to heal. She calls Knox, wondering why this is the first thing she thinks to do.

“Can you talk?”

“And listen,” he says. “With pleasure.”

She throws an internal switch: back to Grace the spy. “He provided a fake address. Twice, actually, but the second time to the cops.”

“That’s ballsy.”

“Afraid the police report would leak,” she says.

“And it did. He was right about that. You and I should not forget.”

“I’m going to try the mobile number he provided to the police. I thought you should know.”

“First, can you get into billing records for the mobile carriers?”

On their first job together, a kidnapping case in Shanghai, they had used a third-party hacker. It had bothered Grace to involve an outsider. Since their return to Hong Kong she had devoted herself to studying with the Data Sciences division at Rutherford Risk, a group that included a cadre of prepubescent freaks who kept their own hours and could drill into any server unobserved. Knox can tell by her silence that she takes offense at his asking.

“To see if the number’s valid, et cetera, before dialing it yourself,” he says. “There could be more accurate billing information with the mobile carrier.”

“Point taken,” Grace said. “And for the record, I had not planned to call from my own mobile.”

“No. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Of course you did.”

“I want to back you up.”

“We’ll see,” she says.

“Just as you helped me at Centraal.”

“It is possible.”

“It’s nonnegotiable.”

“Did you connect with Pangarkar?”

“In a manner of speaking. We were in the same room for a few minutes.”

“We need her.”

He returns the silent treatment.

“I will check the carrier. Then I will call.” She hangs up. She finds a wireless connection in the lobby of the Hotel Pulitzer on Prinsengracht. The mobile’s number Fahiz supplied the police is a pay-as-you-go, rechargeable SIM card from SingTel, a Singapore cellular provider. The pay-as-you-go cards are not registered because there’s no billing; their owner remains anonymous. She and Knox carry several such cards, providing them different, untraceable numbers. But use of a SIM card from a faraway country is an interesting choice for an Amsterdam local. A foreign provider means far higher costs: ten times what one would pay using a local pay-as-you-go card. Fahiz’s use of a foreign SIM tells her that the increased cost doesn’t matter to him, and that distance—real anonymity—does. She wonders if he bought it after the assault to assure he can’t be easily found. But a second check reveals he’s been recharging the card for nearly three years. This takes her into interesting territory.

“Fahiz is something of a curiosity.”

“Aren’t we all.”

She fills him in on the man’s use of a SingTel SIM card, pointing out the added expense, the implication of long-distance travel. She juxtaposes this with the false address he supplied to the police, and his listing his employment as “consultant.”

“You and I, it’s much the same,” Knox says. “Three different cards, three different numbers, three different uses.”

“But an average person?”

“None of us is average,” Knox says. “He could owe child support. He could be a closet billionaire who just wants his privacy. Doesn’t make him a person of interest in and of itself. Maybe he has five wives and five different families.”

“Whose fantasy are we talking about here?”

“It would explain,” he says, “why he gives the police a false address, but a working phone number. He wants to be contacted; he doesn’t want to be able to be found.”

She doesn’t like it when Knox outthinks her. She loses her train of thought.

“All we care about,” Knox says, “is that someone beat the snot out of him in a case of mistaken identity.”

“For safety’s sake, I will call him from a landline. A hotel over on Prinsengracht,” she tells Knox.

“Good idea,” Knox says.

“You wanted to know when I was going to call him.”

“If you make arrangements to meet with him, I want in on that.”

The call is placed from the hotel lounge, brown faux-leather chairs and couches grouped around black marble coffee tables on stainless-steel legs. Grace leaves a credit card with the desk to pay for the call. An automated voice tells her to leave a message. She does so.

Twenty minutes later, she receives a call.

“Ms. Chu?”

“Speaking.”

“Fahiz, here.”

She reintroduces herself as an EU official investigating hate crimes. The police report implied he’d been beaten for something he may have said. She would like to speak with him, if possible.

“The police were not to share my information,” the man protests.

“I am afraid in instances such as yours they have no choice. Brussels is always notified in the case of hate crimes.”

“I was . . . It was a mistake. It was an attack aimed at someone else.”

“Yes. The man quoted in the newspaper article. Similar names. It is horrible.” He says nothing. She continues. “This man, this other Fahiz, has left the city, along with the other sources quoted in the article. It might be wise for you to do the same.”

“Impossible at the moment. I told the police, I want nothing more to do with it beyond being notified
prior
to whatever arrests may be made. Should they miss someone, I do not want to bear the brunt of their reprisals.”

“Then please, help us.”

“Please, do not call me again.”

Hearing his soothing and melodic voice, she’s reminded of fantasies she had believed long buried.

“I found you,” she says. “Others could as well. We should talk.”

A protracted silence results. “Are you there?” she finally asks. “A few minutes is all. A few questions and you are done with me.”
You called me back,
she wants to shout.

There’s a steadily approaching sound in the background of the call. At first, she can’t place it, but then she knows what it is: a tram. Fahiz is in the inner city.

“Hate crimes?” he asks. “To them, we all look the same.”

To
them
, she notes. Plural.

“Your attackers were Dutch? European?”

She expects he may have hung up. When she hears his breathing, she says, “A few minutes is all.” She gives him time to think. “You pick the time and place.”

A long silence hangs over the line. Finally, he says, “Number fifty-four ferry to Noord. Alone. If I don’t contact you onboard, then walk straight up the promenade. Stay on that road. The first departure after the top of the hour. You have forty minutes.” Fahiz ends the call.

Grace stares down at the screen of the phone, her thumbs poised to send Knox a text message.
Alone.
She follows through with the text ending in all caps:

Agreed to meet: #54 ferry to Noord. 40 mins. Alone! YOU CANNOT BE ON FERRY

She wishes she could trust Knox.

—

T
HE
N
OORD
DISTRICT,
with its postcard villages of Ransdorp and Durgerdam is separated from the touristy central district by the brown turbid waters of the IJ harbor. Pedestrians, bicycle and scooter riders, as well as any commuters using Centraal Station forgo the various traffic tunnels, riding the three free ferries that roundtrip in ten minutes. The Venice of the Netherlands, Amsterdam is home to ferries, water taxis and myriad private canal boats, lending the city a romantic, historical seductiveness.

The easiest way to reach the Noord ferries is to cut through Centraal Station. It’s late afternoon—nine minutes remain until his deadline at the top of the hour—and the always busy station is bedlam. The coffee and news shops bulge with customers, choking foot traffic on the concourse. A woman’s voice over a loudspeaker grumbles train numbers and track numbers and times and destinations to where it sounds like a quiz show. There is every form of life here, from the stoned vagabond youth attracted by the city’s open pot cafés, to well-heeled businessmen and -women, mothers pushing strollers, gray-bearded seniors struggling to place their canes into the sea of shoe leather. Grace holds herself back to move with the pace of the crowd, not wanting to stand out. She wonders not if, but from where, Knox is watching. She hates to admit that along with the anxiety of having included him, there is an underlying sense of comfort that he’s likely nearby.

Outside the station, she crosses with pedestrians and turns left to the ferries. Electronic signs announce the Noord destinations and the countdown to departures. Grace slows, but does not stop completely on her approach. Uninterested in the destinations, it’s the numbers painted on the ferry pilot cabins that register with her: 55, 59, 71 . . . There’s an enormous two-level barge tied up to the wharf that contains thousands of chained and locked bicycles. It’s a bicycle parking lot for commuters who use Centraal Station. Sight of it stops Grace and she chastises herself for appearing the tourist.

54

The dock’s electric timer counts down from 3:46. Bicyclists and scooter drivers push into a tangle on the right of the vessel. Pedestrians enter through doors to the left and move forward in a knot as the clock is down to under two minutes and there’s a final rush to board. It’s jammed, only inches separating people. There’s the smell of humanity—perfumes, soaps, sweat, tobacco and wine breath. The stern gangway raises automatically and the ferry’s under way. She is stalwart in her refusal to scan the faces of the passengers, to search for a man studying her. She doesn’t want to spot Knox breaking promises. She can’t allow anger to poison her. She must remain calm and objective. A low-level EU bureaucrat following up on something she’d rather not.

The crossing is fast. Five minutes, tops. The air fills with blue motor oil vapor as the scooters start. The cyclists and pedestrians mix. It’s an orderly off-loading. People fan out. Bikes are mounted, backpacks slung on. Grace joins a flow of pedestrians walking straight ahead on a wide, tree-lined artery with pavement for cars, a substantial bike lane and a sidewalk for pedestrians. The transition to pastoral from the concrete of downtown is immediate. Lawns. Freestanding homes with wrought-iron fences. Birdsong. The air tastes cleaner. A different city, five minutes from Centraal Station.

Still no contact.

“We will turn around now,” speaks a male voice from behind. “I will take your phone.”

Grace hesitates. It’s like handing over her weapon.

“I’ll put it in airplane mode but there is no—”

“Shut if off.” His voice is sharp and icy, causing the opposite reaction in her: a spike of heat. He reaches for her. She pulls away.

“Easy!” she barks. The phone powers down. She shows it to him.

He holds out his hand, expecting its delivery. “No phone, no discussion,” he says.